Furnace Heart
by Sir Serendipity
Summary: "There was a thermonuclear furnace where his heart should be... This boy had the gift of fury. And even now, he was holding himself back" (Stover, ROTS novelisation). An extension of the metaphor and a figurative exploration of what happens when Anakin Skywalker finally lets go - when his furnace heart finally catches him on fire. Set late ROTS. Warnings inside.


**A/N** So. Matthew Stover + his beautiful ROTS novelisation + my endless emotions for Anakin Skywalker = this.

Originally published a couple of months ago as a drabblezilla on my RP blog, askanakin . tumblr.

Just-in-case T for general darkness and references to murdering people, including children.

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_It is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost._ _-M. Scott Peck_

For as long as he can remember, Anakin Skywalker has been holding himself back.

At first there was little to conceal: childish doubts and frustrations, a natural concern for his mother—the thinnest papery frost of fear misting over his heart. As he has grown, though, so has his fear, freezing in translucent crystalline layers and insulating the white-red core of seething anger that pulses inside him like the blade of a lightsaber, dormant but humming with all the potential in the galaxy, a living thing in its own right.

With every doubt the Jedi High Council expresses concerning his abilities or his attitude, with every remark Obi-Wan makes about his arrogance or his impulsiveness, Anakin has to hold himself back; but they don't see—they can't see. They don't notice all the times when he bites back a retort that would get him in trouble; when he averts his eyes and presses his lips together in a thin line that is taut with words unspoken; when that stinging anger rises like bile and he chokes it back, leaving only the taste of sulphur in the back of his throat.

His own slavery, the Trade Federation, Count Dooku, the Separatists—every adversary he has ever faced has been an illusion. _This_ is the monster Anakin Skywalker has always been fighting, and it has been waiting for this day.

As he kneels in what he would once have called Palpatine's office and what the stench of ozone and evil now characterises as the lair of Darth Sidious, he is shown the one way he can ever truly conquer this monster. He has been grappling with it for thirteen years without realising that it only feeds on his struggles, that the battle was futile before it ever began. Now the path he has to take, he was _destined_ to take, lies open before him, and all he needs to take that first step is a single word.

"Henceforth, you shall be known as Darth…" Sidious pauses, and Anakin can feel both of their breaths suspended in the air for a moment before his new master speaks that one word, the permission Anakin has always needed to defeat the monster in the only way possible: to become it.

"_Vader_."

And finally, he lets go.

Frozen fear meets fiery fury with a hiss of steam, and a measured, mechanical exhalation echoes in his soul. Searing heat and aching cold rush intermingled through his every vein and electrodriver and his heart is both the furnace and the reservoir, expelling a lifetime's worth of barely contained emotion with a tangible throbbing that thrums indiscriminately through master, knight, padawan, youngling flesh in icy burning swathes of blue plasma.

By the time Darth Vader looks out across the roiling viscous magma of Mustafar, he has drained himself dry of fear. Flickers of a hungry anger still race beneath his skin and dance in the tips of his fingers, eager for more blood, but he can no longer sense the continuing current sustaining them. They have become a self-sufficient and permanent part of him, flaring through every fibre of his muscles and absorbed into his bones, with no more need for a source than an already raging blaze has for a match.

He closes his eyes for a moment against the blinding glare of lava flows and opens them again inside his own being, in the midst of the dark smoking wreckage of the soul from which those veins of fire originated.

He has already been lost to the flames. Even before it encases his body, a hollow shell of cold black durasteel is all that remains of his heart.


End file.
